Are you looking to improve the ecommerce checkout experience for your customers?
The checkout page is one of the most essential pages on your site. It’s the final page customers interact with before they pay for and complete their orders.
In this post, we list best practices you can follow to optimize your site’s checkout page.
It includes tips on web design, payment methods, shipping, faster checkout and more.
Best practices for ecommerce checkouts
These are the ecommerce checkout best practices we’re going to cover:
- Use a clean, one-page checkout design layout
- Improve your checkout flow
- Optimize your mobile checkout experience
- Enable guest checkout
- Offer one-click checkout
- Offer multiple payment options
- Offer faster shipping options
- Show taxes and fees, but remove unnecessary costs
- Add validation and error notifications to forms
- Allow customers to personalize the checkout experience
- Include autofill options
- Send abandoned cart emails
- Add trust badges to your checkout page
- Don’t add product recommendations to the checkout page
- Don’t include unnecessary fields
- Add support links to the checkout page
- Keep in touch after checkout
1. Use a clean, one-page checkout design layout
There are multiple facets to this technique, the most important being a one-page checkout design.
Multiple checkout pages can seem complicated from the customer’s perspective, even with progress bars.
A one-page checkout design gives your customer the ability to see every field they need to fill out in order to complete their order.
According to Statista, 22% of customers leave the checkout page because the checkout process itself is too long or complicated.
You should also use a clean design. Remove unnecessary images, and make sure the only elements on the page are ones your customer needs in order to complete checkout.
You should also remove the navigation menu from the checkout page. This makes it harder for customers to return to the shop once the checkout process begins.
2. Improve your checkout flow
The checkout flow is the process customers must go through in order to checkout. This should be as simple as possible to encourage customers to actually complete it.
Here’s a decent checkout flow that’s short, simple and can easily fit on one page:
- Form 1 – Email address
- Form 2 – Shipping address
- Form 3 – Billing address
- Form 4 – Payment
There should also be a box, typically in the sidebar, with the order’s total as well as any shipping and handling fees, taxes the customer must pay, and estimated delivery time.
After the customer checks out, redirect them to an order confirmation page.
This page should have a sign-up button or form logged-out customers can use to create accounts for easier checkout next time. Only add this option if you’re able to apply the customer’s order to their newly created account.
3. Optimize your mobile checkout experience
Have you ever gone through your own checkout process on a mobile device? Have you done so from multiple browsers, including Samsung Internet, Opera and UC Browser?
According to Statista, 63% of online purchases are made from mobile devices. This means your customers will most likely use smartphones to check out from your store.
If you’re using a premade template, you shouldn’t have to worry about optimizing your site for mobile.
However, if you have a developer or an ecommerce platform that uses a page builder, you should be able to control how certain elements look based on the device your customer uses.
4. Enable guest checkout
According to Statista, 26% of customers leave the checkout process because the site used forced account creation in order to complete checkout.
This was the second most popular option, only beaten by extra costs, such as shipping fees and taxes, being too high. This option received 48% of votes.
Guest checkout gives customers the freedom to shop without having to come up with a new password and without having the commitment of having yet another account they may not be able to delete.
Unfortunately, quite a few ecommerce sites do not allow customers to delete their accounts. Some don’t even allow customers to delete their payment information.
This has led many customers to be wary about creating new accounts for online shopping.
5. Offer one-click checkout
You can make the ecommerce checkout process really simple for loyal customers by offering one-click checkout.
One-click checkout allows a customer to complete an order from the product page in one click.
Once you add this feature to your online store, your customer can choose a preferred payment method for it.
Then, when they browse a product page on your site, they can click the “One-Click Checkout” button to pay for and create an online order for that product.
6. Offer multiple payment options
You can simplify the payment process on your ecommerce checkout page by offering multiple payment options.
According to Statista, 13% of customers abandon online checkout because there weren’t enough payment options.
Include digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay so customers can use cards they’ve saved to their devices without having to enter them manually.
You should also offer payment options like PayPal and Stripe so customers don’t have to save their payment information to your site.
This will encourage potential customers to complete the checkout process.
7. Offer faster shipping options
According to Statista, 23% of customers abandon the checkout process because the estimated delivery time is too slow.
Waiting for orders to ship is one of the biggest drawbacks of online shopping. You can really do a lot to improve conversions for your ecommerce store by offering faster shipping options.
Start by seeing if there are ways you can speed up order fulfillment from your warehouse.
However, unless you’re willing to deliver your own orders, you’re going to have to look for couriers who offer faster delivery. Then, you’re either going to have to pass those costs onto your customers or increase prices so you can offer cheaper delivery fees.
8. Show taxes and fees, but remove unnecessary costs
Again, 48% of customers abandon the checkout process because extra costs are too high. This means you can do a lot to improve conversions by removing unnecessary costs.
You can cut back on shipping fees by raising prices on your products. This way, customers won’t feel as though they’re being “nickel and dimed” on every little facet of the ecommerce process.
Taxes are unavoidable, but you can stop charging customers unnecessary fees, such as processing fees, packaging fees and things of this nature.
These extra costs should be covered by the prices you list on your products. You don’t do customers any favors by charging less for products only to charge them for every little cost associated with their order.
9. Add validation and error notifications to forms
This is a simple web design trick that can improve the user experience (UX) of your ecommerce website.
Validation notifications are the green checkmarks that appear on online forms when you enter a field correctly.
Error notifications are the red Xs that appear when you don’t complete a required field correctly.
These small notifications let your customer know if they’re completing checkout sufficiently.
10. Allow customers to personalize the checkout experience
While some customers prefer to check out as guests and others prefer to use digital wallets, some still like to save their information to your store.
This allows them to choose which shipping address and payment methods they want to use for different orders.
You can truly allow customers to personalize the checkout experience by allowing them to choose a preferred payment method for orders.
You can also allow them to create order profiles that have different shipping addresses and payment methods.
This allows them to easily select one of their profiles at checkout.
11. Include autofill options
Autofill allows customers to speed up the checkout process by allowing their browsers or tools like 1Password to fill in shipping and payment information automatically.
Enabling autofill options on forms gives customers the ability to speed up the checkout process with saved information, even when they check out as guests.
12. Send abandoned cart emails
The average abandoned cart rate for the entire ecommerce industry is 70.19%, according to Baymard Institute.
This means that you can expect the vast majority of visitors who place items in their carts to abandon checkout before completing it.
This is pretty grim since this only gives you a 30% conversion rate from customers who place items in their cart.
Reengage these customers by sending them abandoned cart reminder emails.
Even some guests go through enough of the checkout process for you to have collected their email addresses.
Send the first reminder one to three days after they abandoned their cart. The email should include the products they abandoned.
Send a second and final email seven days after they abandoned their cart, but include an exclusive discount this time to truly encourage them to complete their purchase.
Some businesses send a third email that includes product recommendations and a request for feedback on why the customer does not want to complete checkout.
13. Add trust badges to your checkout page
According to Statista, 25% of customers abandon checkout because they do not trust the site with their credit card information.
Offering digital wallets and payment options like Stripe can help with this issue, but you can also add relevant trust badges to the checkout page.
These include badges from services like Norton, McAfee and Sucuri who offer site security.
Badges like Google Trusted Store, PayPal Verified and BBB Accredited Business may help as well.
14. Don’t add product recommendations to checkout pages
You can add product recommendations to the cart page and even as a popup before customers enter the checkout page, but don’t add product recommendations to the checkout page itself.
While it can be tempting to upsell customers, these may only distract a customer who was about to pay for their order.
If you add product recommendations to the checkout page, they may want to view that product’s product page or research it on other sites.
Small inconveniences like these may discourage them from completing their orders.
15. Don’t include unnecessary fields
You should only include fields that are necessary for order fulfillment on the checkout page.
Don’t include a field for your customer’s phone number if you don’t offer order updates via SMS.
Don’t ask customers to join your loyalty program on the checkout page. You can do this on the order confirmation page or in emails.
Every field you add to the checkout page should only be relevant to order fulfillment, such as shipping information and payment information.
16. Add support links to the checkout page
Add all support links you have to the checkout page. This may encourage customers who are having difficulty completing the checkout process to reach out to support instead of abandoning checkout.
Add a link to your knowledge base as well. This will encourage customers to answer their own questions, such as questions about returns and refunds.
If your site has live chat, include a visible link for it so your customer can chat with a customer service representative without leaving the checkout page.
17. Keep in touch after checkout
The checkout process doesn’t end after your customer completes their order.
You need to send them order confirmation emails and emails for shipping updates.
You can also send them recommendations for helpful articles related to their purchase. These should be sent separately from order-related emails.
Hopefully, you create your own content and can recommend your own articles or videos.
Once they receive their order, wait a few days to a week, and ask them to leave a review for it. You can also ask them to leave reviews for your store on Google, Facebook and other relevant review sites.
You should also send product recommendations related to your customer’s order sometime after they receive their order. You can send them recommendations on a regular basis.
If the product your customer ordered is something they’ll eventually run out and need more of, send restock reminders to them.
Final thoughts
Your store’s checkout is one of the most important parts of the customer journey.
Get it wrong and you’re losing sales. Get it right and you’ll be increasing your average transaction values across the board. More sales and more revenue.
So, treat this post as a checklist to work through. There’s a lot to consider, but the benefits are well worth the time and effort.
